LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Between rising costs and declining enrollment, many colleges around the country are struggling. Dozens have simply shut down, while some state schools are trying to find ways to keep from doing that, especially those in rural areas, where students have few other options for higher education. One state is trying to keep campuses open by merging them with other colleges. Vermont Public's Liam Elder-Connors reports.
LIAM ELDER-CONNORS, BYLINE: Back in 2020, Vermont state universities were in trouble. Enrollment was down more than 11%, and fewer Vermont students were graduating high school. Then COVID hit. Students went home, and the state colleges had to refund room and board payments, putting them near the financial brink. Jeb Spaulding, the chancellor of the state colleges at the time, proposed closing three campuses.
JEB SPAULDING: I looked at it like, OK, we have a fleet, and occasionally, you need to sacrifice a ship to make sure that the fleet is going to stay intact.
ELDER-CONNORS: But trying to close campuses, as other states are doing, proved to be a political powder keg.
SPAULDING: I guess I didn't realize that in the public realm, you can't make the kind of difficult decisions that if you were in a private institution that you would have to make.
ELDER-CONNORS: Within days, the closure plan was withdrawn and Spaulding resigned.
SPAULDING: When the politics got involved, then it became clear to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to get that through.
ELDER-CONNORS: Instead, state college officials came up with a plan to merge the three separate state colleges. The plan would save the state money on personnel costs - for example, there's only one university president, not three - and consolidating campus services like the financial aid office to one physical location. And so a new institution, Vermont State University, was born. But VTSU was ordered to cut spending, and that led to some controversial proposals, like a plan to replace all physical library books with digital copies. That didn't sit well with students like Raymonda Parchment.
RAYMONDA PARCHMENT: That's kind of messed up. So it's moments like that where it's - the student population has had to really send some fiery emails.
ELDER-CONNORS: The library plan did not go through, but there have been other cuts. Ten academic programs, including agriculture and school psychology, were eliminated and another dozen were consolidated, like literature and creative writing. The university largely avoided layoffs, but only after 17 faculty members took buyouts. Sebastion Lury, copresident of the administrative staff's union, says these cost-saving decisions didn't have enough faculty input.
SEBASTION LURY: I think the overwhelming feeling is that decision-makers just looked at numbers and stats and decided this is what we're going to do without talking to people in the programs.
ELDER-CONNORS: These mergers aren't just in Vermont. Pennsylvania, Georgia and California have merged state colleges in recent years. There are some good signs for VTSU in the 18 months since the merger became official. First-year enrollment was up 14% this fall, and there's more people enrolling in the college's plumber and electrician apprenticeship programs. But VTSU president David Bergh says there's still a $25 million deficit, and the campuses are overbuilt.
DAVID BERGH: We have some excess residential capacity on some of our campuses. We have some administrative spaces that we don't fully utilize.
ELDER-CONNORS: It's not clear what VTSU will do about its empty dorms, but there's little appetite to close any campuses. Parchment, one of the 4,800 students at VTSU, grew up in a small town near one of the state colleges. She says these institutions are important for her and her peers.
PARCHMENT: Because if you can't afford to go out of state for college, where does that leave you with no school within commuting distance and that's also within our state school system so the financial aid might be more forgiving? You know what I mean?
ELDER-CONNORS: Parchment graduated in December. She says she hopes to keep writing for her local newspaper, an opportunity she found by going to college in her home state.
For NPR News, I'm Liam Elder-Connors in Johnson, Vermont.
FADEL: This story was reported in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, which covers inequality and innovation in education.
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